Professor Ilanko Ilanko - 2013 Inaugural Professorial Lecture Series
25 Jun 2013 6:00 PM
"Turning negatives into positives: The mistaken negative mass and why it is important to take a flexible attitude to life"
Professor Ilanko's research and teaching looks at the behaviour of structures - how they move, how they undergo stress and how they vibrate. He says structures, like people, will undergo more stress when they are less flexible. "So sometimes it is useful to introduce some flexibility in structures to reduce stress levels."
Professor Ilanko draws many other similarities between the forces on structures and on people, and this is the theme of his Inaugural Professorial Lecture this month.
When Professor Ilanko mistakenly put a negative symbol in front of a 'mass' in a complex engineering calculation in his PhD thesis, he inadvertently discovered a possible refinement to the 'Penalty method', a common numerical problem that has plagued scientists and engineers for more than 60 years.
The resulting calculations lead to more than 15 peer-reviewed journal articles and some healthy debate among his Engineering peers. "One reviewer went as far as to call it 'black magic', so in engineering circles 'negative mass' is probably still quite controversial."
Tickets: Free to public